Behind the Seen Page 9
An edit decision list (EDL), a database listing every cut in a movie that is generated by a digital editing system, such as Avid Film Composer or Final Cut Pro.
Negative cutting is done in a dust-free environment. The cutter wears white cotton gloves and makes splices using cement. There can be no mistakes. Each cement splice destroys one frame of negative, since the adjacent frame must be scraped to make a “hot splice.” Negative cutters work alone, for the most part. In the film business, they are the only crew members for whom a compulsive, sometimes neurotic personality is considered a job requirement, if not an asset. They work much like gem cutters, where a mistaken move can ruin the goods—except that a feature film negative is worth far more than most diamonds.
During post-production, the film editor is essentially creating the “pattern,” or template, that the negative cutter will later use to cut the whole cloth into a finished garment. That cut list must be exactly correct in referring to the original film negative. The basis for indexing all that film footage (114 miles of it in the case of Cold Mountain) is the key codes. Each frame of film has a unique address or marker. These alphanumeric inscriptions reside on the edge of the film negative, in the area outside the viewable frame. They occur once every foot (16 frames), pre-burned into the film stock when it is manufactured. A second set of tracking information is applied to the film workprint, or dailies. These are called edge numbers or print codes. They are stamped onto the edge of the film by an assistant using an Acmade numbering machine. The format is usually a seven-digit code, like a telephone number. The first three digits refer to the camera roll number, the last four to the footage. Different inking colors can be used to create sub-levels and categories. For example, you might code all footage using visual effects in red.
A sample of 35mm film showing negative key codes imprinted by Kodak at the time of manufacture. This system gives every frame of film its own unique address so editors can keep track of their whereabouts throughout the long process of film editing.
Keeping track of all the footage in a feature film is a major systems challenge. Typically, a two-hour feature film might have a shooting ratio of 20:1. That is, for every minute of film in the final release print, 20 minutes were shot. Even that shooting ratio is misleading, because a fair amount of film stock is wasted in normal operations: starts and stops, film run through the camera to thread it up, and hunks of leftovers that are not long enough to record a complete take (“short ends”). However, in some films, such as Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the shooting ratio is much higher—100:1 or more.
The accounting method in day-to-day assembling of a film relies on the edge codes printed onto the workprint. These are what the editing team will use to conform the 35mm workprint to the arrangement of shots edited in the computer. Key codes on the negative don’t come into use until the end of the process, when the negative must be cut. However, both sets of numbers are encoded from the beginning, before editing irretrievably mixes up all the footage. With non-linear digital editing like Final Cut Pro or Avid, a lot of data—starting and ending key codes and print codes for each take—must be added manually by an assistant when the footage is digitized or brought into the computer.
Whether a film is edited on an upright Moviola, on a flatbed, or in a digital system such as Final Cut Pro, the same thing will eventually be delivered to the negative cutter: an EDL listing all the correct edit points. When a film is cut only using workprint, the edit list is manually written. The negative cutter also has the edited film workprint and its printed-through key codes as a guide for double-checking, but the list is paramount. When digitally editing, the alphanumeric key codes entered at the beginning remain embedded in the media files, hidden but available. They emerge in the cut list when it is generated on the computer.
Creating an EDL automatically is one of the most valuable timesaving benefits of non-linear editing. With a couple of keystrokes, you can produce a complex database that, in the analog world might take an assistant a week to make—with inadvertent errors a likelihood. EDLs from a non-linear system also have a built-in feature to check for any duplicate frames. Since every cut to the negative eliminates one neighboring frame (remember, it’s called “destructive editing”), the negative cutter needs to know ahead of time if any of those abutting film frames must be used somewhere else in the film. If so, an assistant will ask the lab to make a duplicate copy of the take in question, a dupe negative. Cut lists must be absolutely frame-accurate. Should a decision list go to the negative cutter with inaccuracies, disaster results. Needed frames may be mangled or—even worse—an incorrect version of the film may get printed at the lab.
Long before an EDL is required for the negative cutting, film assistants need a similar cut-by-cut database called a change list to do their work. The change list catalogs all the variations between two different edited versions of a film. The assistants use this to re-cut the workprint on their editing benches, conforming the projectable film to its digital counterpart. Sound editors also use the change lists to conform their soundtracks to match new versions; otherwise their audio work will be out of date or out of sync. Another beauty of digital editing is the ease with which this information can be communicated from the picture department to the sound editors.
Getting a reliable edit decision list out of Final Cut Pro was not a problem. But Cullen had to know if and when FCP would be able to generate dependable change lists. Did Apple at least have it in the works? Ramy replied that it was being developed, but he wasn’t sure it would be ready in time. Troubling news, but for an assistant film editor, there is no such thing as a perfect world. It helps, however, when variables such as this are known ahead of time.
All digital editing systems crash, lose media, or otherwise throw uncertainties into the path of a feature film barreling down the road to completion on a tight schedule. As Sean says, “I noticed working with the Avid on English Patient, things like media crashes and corruption all had the same amount of difficulty to solve. But when Avid told us, ‘That’s not a problem, just get over it,’ those were the things that really stuck in our minds. When they were open and up front about it, even though we were putting in the same amount of work, we thought, ‘Oh, that’s just part of the cost of using Avid.’”
“I didn’t want to get into a situation where I had suggested that we go the Final Cut route, knowing there were things that were going to be a problem,” Sean says. “Either not telling Walter, or minimizing problems, then having them come up. That’s always a pain.” Cullen wants to go through all the things with DigitalFilm Tree—both good and bad—that might materialize, to get a sense of how much of a problem they are going to be and how much energy it will take to do workarounds. Says Sean: “If it was something that wasn’t going to be fixed but I could solve, I could say to Walter, ‘It’s a problem, but I’ll take care of it.’ On an Avid, you’re taking care of things all the time. I knew there was going to be a certain amount of that going on.”
One of Final Cut Pro’s big advantages is price. Murch can have four fully loaded Final Cut Pro editing systems for less than the cost of one Avid system. Having four machines means backup and redundancy, thus avoiding project-wide crashes or breakdowns and making serious downtime much less likely. Apple’s Final Cut Pro system is relatively immune to serious crashes because it is a software-only system (except for a third-party card for digitizing) that is designed to run on Apple hardware. And because it can also run on a laptop, FCP gives an editing team great flexibility and mobility.
“I was immediately reminded of the fact that most kitchen stoves have four burners,” Walter says later. “When you’re cooking a big meal for the family you use all those burners. And in retrospect, looking back at all those shows I’ve done with two stations, it was very similar to trying to cook a banquet on two burners. There’s a lot of, ‘Well, I’ll take off the cauliflower and put that to one side. Meanwhile cook up the onions... Oops, the cauliflower has to go back on again!�
� There’s just so much juggling because of all the different tasks you have to do at the same time.”
A “four-burner” configuration for Cold Mountain will provide one station for Walter to work on and a second for Sean to do syncing up of dailies, file management, and some editing. Of the two other stations, one will digitize “in” and the other will digitize “out.” That is, station three will be connected to a Beta SP videotape deck for the purpose of transposing videotapes of film dailies into the QuickTime digital files that FCP uses. Station four will take dailies, scenes, and assemblies from FCP and put them onto other media—sometimes VHS tapes but most often DVD—so that producers, the studio, and other post-production crew can view versions of the film as a work-in-progress.
Shawn Paper, film editor on Month of August (released in 2002), the first feature film to use Final Cut Pro.
“I enjoy collaborative work,” says Murch. “One of the profound implications of FCP is that it is so inexpensive that anyone with a PowerBook—and one of the machines we had was an old clamshell iBook—can download media and edit with it. So I was giving scenes to the assistants and apprentices for them to cut their teeth on. It’s a great teaching tool. Plus, it gave us a great deal of reliability and flexibility, in addition to being a system that I found completely transparent and enjoyable in the day-to-day cutting of the film.”
When Final Cut Pro first surfaced, the post-production community in Los Angeles didn’t take it seriously. It was not ready for an alternative to Avid. “People ridiculed it,” says Ramy. One day a film editor, Shawn Paper, who had always used the Avid system, came to Ramy and said, “I’ve got Final Cut Pro at home. Can I do this?” And Ramy said yes. And with help from DigitalFilm Tree, Paper cut the first feature film, Month of August, on Final Cut Pro.
That led to DFT working on several other motion pictures using FCP, such as Full Frontal in 2001, which was directed by Steven Soderbergh and edited by Sarah Flack, and featured David Duchovny, Catherine Keener, and Julia Roberts. DFT also supplied Final Cut Pro systems for The Rules of Attraction (2002), directed by Roger Avary and edited by Sharon Rutter, starring James Van Der Beek and Shannyn Sossamon. Then, in the spring of 2002, Sean Cullen and Cold Mountain walked in the door.
Since the first meeting went well, Sean wants to bring Walter to DigitalFilm Tree to “kick the tires,” as he put it. He requests a system that looks good on both monitors—record and playback—and he wants some footage available that Walter can cut. He reminds DFT that they still have made no financial arrangement. They tell Sean not to worry.
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What Do You Drive?
“Some [editors] were concerned that working with cheaper equipment might mean that editors would command less respect.”—from a May/June 2001 Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine article reporting on a Final Cut Pro/FilmLogic seminar presented in part by DigitalFilm Tree.
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In the meantime, Ramy runs out to buy the second edition of Murch’s 1995 classic book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye. He is shocked to find a long passage about Final Cut Pro and FilmLogic in the afterword. (That section, new to the 2001 edition, is called “Digital Film Editing: Past, Present and Imagined Future,” and fills fully half of the book’s 146 pages.) “How does Walter know about this stuff?” Ramy remembers thinking. “It was so new. When I told some of the people we work with that the next Final Cut Pro project could be for Walter Murch, they freaked out. People who come from the editing community were stunned. I wondered, ‘Why is Walter Murch even talking to us? We’re nobody.’”
Sean phones DFT a few days before he brings Walter to the company. “How’s it going? Are you guys ready?”
“Yeah, we’re all ready.”
“How good does the video look?”
“It looks great.”
“I need to know: does it look great, or does it look so-so? Because if it looks so-so, I’ll get Walter ready now.”
“No, it looks great.”
Sean doesn’t prompt Walter before they go together to see DigitalFilm Tree. Nevertheless, on the way over, he zeroes in on the potential problem.
Walter Murch’s book on film editing theory and practice, In the Blink of an Eye.
“How’s the video?” Walter wants to know.
“It should be good,” Sean tells him.
Walter and Sean arrive at DFT and are introduced to Edvin Mehrabyan, Tim Serda, Walter Shires, John Taylor, and Dan Fort. The group then goes into the edit suite, which doubles as a training room for Final Cut Pro users and students. Ramy and his team are smiling, feeling both sanguine and nervous. They have a brief discussion about what Murch and Cullen want to accomplish while they are there, and then... it’s showtime!
As Sean later remembers it, “The video image was good. Walter said it could get better, but it was definitely passable, that he could do a show on it.” Though he tries not to show it, Ramy is ecstatic.
Later, Ramy recalls the impact of having Walter Murch come to DigitalFilm Tree: “It wasn’t simply his award-winning credits. It wasn’t that he was the first Academy Award-winning editor we worked with. He was the third or fourth. It was the fact that he was wearing tennis shoes when he came here. The fact that he was down to earth, that he later sat right down to check his email. That’s when we started to appreciate that he was different. He would ask things and we would just look at each other. He wasn’t a pushover; his questions were brutal.” A silent stare from Murch can be intimidating, even for someone who is technically savvy. Ramy, freely admitting he was the least knowledgeable about technical things and editing, describes how during that first session with Murch at DFT, he intentionally put himself out there with incomplete information to force the other DFT people to chime in with more complete answers to Murch’s questions.
“We mostly told him what was bad about Final Cut,” Ramy says. “It will do things that are heart-stopping, and we knew this going in. We never sat down and tried to sell him. After you have spent months cutting a show, FCP can dish up an error message saying, ‘Sequence won’t open,’ or ‘File not found,’” Ramy says. One editor describes FCP as “jackass-put-together, dumb-shit code, a bullshit program.” Even Ramy, who is an evangelist, admits FCP is an application often constructed out of “sheer voodoo.” He says: “Things happen that make no logical sense. You can lose your project, or you’re doing a color-correction job, and all of a sudden it’s gone, like vapor, and you can’t find it.” Given that FCP is an application first developed by Macromedia, then rushed into its first release version by Apple, Ramy calls it “a hack on top of a hack.”
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Ramy Katrib On Digital Film Editing
I am humbled when I consider how film editing systems have developed over the last 100 years. DFT was born with technologies like Final Cut Pro and Cinema Tools and flourishes because of them. When I started using Final Cut Pro 1.0 to manage and cut my documentaries, I never dreamed it would lead to DFT, Cold Mountain, and the effect we’ve had on the post industry. We are following in the footsteps of all the pioneers who bled before us.
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Still at DFT, Walter goes through what Sean calls “the artistic stuff”: how the interface feels, what other editors had problems with, how fast it is and how quickly sequences load—things that he knew he would be doing day in and day out. In his mind, he was weighing FCP against the Avid. “A lot of his questions, as mine had been, were referenced off the Avid,” Sean said. “We were on an Avid, we had used Avid. We knew the Avid problems, knew the Avid strengths. So a lot of it was comparing. Very much to DigitalFilm Tree’s credit, they never said, ‘Final Cut’s better.’ They were very honest: ‘Well, Avid is better at that, but Final Cut is still passable.’ Or, ‘Final Cut really doesn’t have that,’ or ‘Final Cut is much better at that than the Avid.’”
Three major concerns emerge by the end of the meeting at DFT: 1) how to generate accurate change lists to keep a 35mm film workprint version conformed to match
the Final Cut Pro version; 2) how to transfer soundtracks on Walter’s machine—“sequence information”—to the sound editors’ ProTools workstations; and 3) whether FCP could swallow, digest, and play back so much media—a first assembly that might exceed five hours of running time. Sean admits he is less concerned about list-making functions because he won’t need them for nearly a year. DFT isn’t too worried about transferability of sequence information since they had access to programmers and engineers who are experienced with OMF (Open Media Format, the file format for transferring audio material between applications). DFT also knows that Apple is working on developments that might give Final Cut Pro a mechanism for exporting edited audio tracks to digital audio workstations (DAW).
Walter isn’t so easily satisfied, however. “He really wanted to know about the sequence transfer to the sound department,” Sean recalls, “because he’s very much a sound person, and he has a lot of experience working with sound departments. Walter knows that the more friction you have [between picture and sound departments], the harder the whole process is.”
“What if Apple doesn’t do it?” Walter asks. “What are we going to do?” The question hangs in the air.
In a way, the money discussion is easier. It comes down to Ramy saying: “Just as long as you take us on board when you do the film, this will all be pro bono work. And if you don’t take us, we’ll get a lot of good experience researching this.”